Holley: Storm victims seek relief by sharing stories

New Orleans snare drummer Lumar LeBlanc was one of dozens of interviewers with the "Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston" project. Photograph by Dallas McNamara.

New Orleans snare drummer Lumar LeBlanc was one of dozens of interviewers with the "Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston" project. Photograph by Dallas McNamara.

Photo: Dallas McNamara

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Folklorists Pat Jasper (l) of the Houston Arts Alliance and Carl Lindahl of the University of Houston helped Katrina and Rita survivors collect stories that now are in the Library of Congress.

Folklorists Pat Jasper (l) of the Houston Arts Alliance and Carl Lindahl of the University of Houston helped Katrina and Rita survivors collect stories that now are in the Library of Congress.

Photo: Joe Holley, Joe Holley/Houston Chronicle

Holley: Storm victims seek relief by sharing stories

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Here's a story University of Houston English professor and folklorist Carl Lindahl told me on a wet Wednesday afternoon this week, our city not yet recovered from Sunday night's deadly deluge:

It was another Wednesday, 11 years ago, and Lindahl had responded to the UH president's request for the academic community to volunteer in the massive effort to get Katrina evacuees settled in Houston. Although he's one of the world's foremost scholars of folk narrative, Lindahl wasn't a specialist - a medical professional or a social worker - so his assignment was to sort piles of donated clothes at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

Among the tired and bedraggled evacuees waiting for help was a New Orleans resident in his 50s who was maybe 6 feet 7 inches tall. "He had this amazing mixture of looking both composed and bewildered," the professor recalls. "And I was trying to find pants for him that were long enough in the leg to fit him. And it took us quite a while. And he started telling me a story, not because I asked him, but because apparently he just needed to tell it."

The tall evacuee told Lindahl that he was among seven people trapped on the second floor of a building as the filthy water rose up the stairwell. When it became obvious help wasn't coming, the man stepped off into "the junk" and swam block after block to a drug store, broke in and liberated several cases of water. He had never broken into anything in his life, he told Lindahl. He apologized.

To get the heavy cases back, he fashioned a harness out of a rope and coat hangers, attached the clumsy contraption to his shoulders and plunged back into the water. He survived and so did his friends in the building, thanks to his remarkable feat. And now, this unprepossessing middle-aged man had made his way to Houston with nothing but the clothes on his back, and even they were unwearable.

His story was so powerful in the telling because he had to tell it, Lindahl concluded. He had to convince himself that it had really happened. It was as if the heaviness of that experience was too burdensome to bear alone.

"I was so impressed by the humility with which he told this story," the professor recalls. "I was so awed by what he said, I forgot to ask his name. That story just kept haunting me."

Lindahl also realized at that moment that he may not be a doctor or a social worker, but as a professor of narrative he was a specialist of sorts. He saw a way to help beyond sorting clothes.

The mild-mannered scholar called his friend and fellow folklorist Pat Jasper, the brash, take-charge founder of Texas Folklife Resources in Austin, and in the coming weeks the two of them developed a one-of-a-kind project called "Surviving Katrina and Rita in Houston."

More Information

Storm Songs & Stories

When: May 4; doors open at 7 p.m., show at 8 p.m.

Where: Upstairs at Rudyard's, 2010 Waugh

Info: No cover; open mic; all storm-related songs, stories, poems are welcome.

Sponsored by UH, with money from the Houston Endowment and elsewhere and with assistance from the Library of Congress, the idea was to train survivors to gather narratives from their own communities.

'Rebuilding community'

The two folklorists knew that survivors sharing stories with fellow survivors would be a more powerful and cathartic experience than telling their stories to notebook-scribbling journalists, oral historians or therapists. They knew that people who have been through traumatic events are more likely to open up to those who have survived similar experiences - and both are changed by the encounter.

With assistance from Margaret Bulger, director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the two Texas folklorists designed an intensive, weeklong field school at UH that provided fundamental research skills - how to conduct an interview, how to record and transcribe it, how to be sensitive to ethical concerns. Participants were paid for their time in the classroom and the field.

"What we found was that by bringing these people together to learn how to collect stories and tell each other their own stories, they started rebuilding community, this community of survivors," Jasper told me Wednesday afternoon. "There really is a lot of evidence outside our field of folklore that telling one's story leads to creating social networks, leads to enhanced resilience, leads to rebuilding a new form of community for the people who have been traumatized."

Chantell Jones embodies that evidence. A 19-year-old community college student in New Orleans when Katrina destroyed her New Orleans East neighborhood, she and her large extended family had to be rescued by helicopter. They made their way to Austin and then Houston, where they bounced from shelter to shelter before moving into a Greenspoint-area motel for two months. That's when they began to realize that they weren't going back home and when Jones became an interviewer with the survivor project. She conducted an estimated 40 interviews.

"I knew a lot of people over here," she told me, "and it was very emotional telling the stories and hearing the stories, seeing the hurt and the pain that people went through. But part of it was therapeutic. It bonded us, made us closer."

Jones, 30, is now a Houstonian. She works for a company that does media research. This week's flood, she said, "brings back all the bad memories. I've cried every day this week."

'What else' but write?

Lindahl and Jasper, like Jones, have moved on to other projects, although Lindahl's work is a more ambitious outgrowth of the Katrina-Rita project. He's worked with tsunami survivors in Japan, earthquake survivors in Haiti and, currently, Syrian refugees in Italy. As in Houston, he's helping them tell their stories.

Also like Jones, Jasper and her husband have become Houstonians. She's developed an ambitious folk-life program for her richly diverse city and on May 4 will present one last look at Houston's Katrina, Rita and Ike experiences. In conjunction with Houston Grand Opera, it's an open-mike presentation at Rudyard's on Waugh called "Storm Songs & Stories." She got the idea some years ago, she said, when she realized how many local roots musicians had written Ike songs.

"What the hell else were people doing," she asked the other day, "when there was no electricity, and they couldn't go to work? They were writing songs, they were writing poems, they were creating spoken-word pieces."

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They'll be offering up those pieces May 4, as will longtime New Orleans snare drummer Lumar LeBlanc, one of Jasper's interviewers when he escaped to Houston after Katrina. I talked to him this week by phone from New Orleans, where he and his band Soul Rebels are rehearsing for Jazz Fest.

"People sharing, even though it was in the middle of a catastrophe, gave us a sense of self-sufficiency," he said. "That's the part that I most admired about the survivor project."

A vital need

LeBlanc, a Texas Southern graduate, has long known what Jasper has discovered about her adopted city. After Ike, she said, "I realized that every Houstonian has a storm story."

The immediate need in this town, of course, is to make sure that people are safe, that they have a roof over their heads, that they have clean clothes to wear. But there will come a time - in fact, it's probably here now - when our latest storm survivors will realize that sharing their stories also is a vital need. The memoirist Patricia Hampl once put it this way: "A story, we sense, is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing."

If we're among the lucky ones, if we escaped this week unscathed, one of our tasks will be to listen to those stories. Just listen.